Dreams, drawings and psychoanalytic fun

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I was watching a film at my parents’ place (a device my subconscious particularly loves to use). In it, an almost-pubescent girl was guest at a huge old house owned by a man with something of the undead about him. To my dreaming mind, the house looked like that of my best friend from junior school, with the same split level floors (the first floor had mezzanines, and didn’t make sense as just one storey), and rooms that instead of having jusst one door – in and out – had doors in at least two of their walls, so that you could lock one door behind you and carry on through the other exit to the next chamber. But this house, of course, was much bigger than the one where I used to play.

Other guests were staying at the house, adults and children, mostly females, the girl didn’t know how many. Almost nightly, a guest or two would disappear, presumed eaten, but the girl didn’t guess that her host was the culprit. He was a kind man, her friend, if a little hard for some people to understand because he kept to himself and was ponderously intellectual. The girl liked that. She understood it.

By now, almost all the others were gone. The girl was beginning, reluctantly at first and then with terror, to face what she had suspected all along but suppressed. She had thought her gentle host wouldn’t attack her. She had turned a blind eye to what happened to the others, as lond as she believed herself exempt. But what else had she decieved herself about?

She crept down to the cellar seeking – but hoping not to find – evidence of what had happened to her fellows. Their remains, some of their possessions, even – could they be? – some people still alive. In the cellar was a sunken pool filled with a kind of stagnant green slime. (At this point, my mum came into the room, looked at the TV screen and said, “I’m not watching this, it’s too grisly for me.”)

Terrified, the girl fled back upstairs. In the dark house, she ran through room after room locking each door behind her, both looking for her delusive host and praying not to be found by him.

In one room, she could dimly make out a bed, and a man sitting on it. From the faint moonlight coming in through the heavy curtains, she did not see his full nakedness but only the strong torso lit by a cold blue glow. In the silence and darkness, she softly reached out her hand to touch this male skin. For a moment, she was rapt at the sensation of solid muscle beneath her fingers. The man did not move; had she percieved him in that moment as a man and not merely a sensual object, she would have sensed him holding his breath too. Then she remembered that her murderous host would soon find her here if she didn’t run, and so she scrambled into the next room, struggling with trembling fingers to secure the chain on the door.

Trying to extricate myself from a dangerous cult, they trying to re-kidnap me. The house I was living / hiding in looks a bit like my uncle’s (dad’s brother-in-law’s). My mum was helping protect me; we fought off the intruders from the cult by throwing handbags at them. Mum hefted handbags down the hallway at them, while I, halfway upstairs, pitched more over the bannisters, and Tiggy (the family cat, circa 2001-2007) ran around helping in the ways that only cats can.

I’m looking at a note-to-self that I wrote in the middle of the night:

It says Bunnymen (presumably Echo and the – ), bonfires, and the name of my godmother who died in 2005.

I don’t know.

I do remember unlocking the door to what was my house in the dream (in reality, the front door of a friend-of-a-friend’s house, which I’ve been past but never into), and entering the kitchen (in reality, the kitchen I knew until I was seven). My godmother, J, came to see me there. She knew I was tired from working long days in my administration job, and from having the baby to raise on my own.

Later, a bitter row with my Mum (whose best friend was J), at the dinner table. My Dad and his brother-in-law were there too. Mum made digs about my relationship with my ex (? By which I mean my real life ex, presumably the dream-baby’s father), and I retaliated by saying that her comments were equally true of her relationship with my father. Ouch.

I’d booked to see a play – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – at the theatre I used to work at. But whereas the real venue is in a modern building, this one was a tall Victorian edifice with a steep rake on each of the four tiers.

I’d been keen enough that I came to see the show on my own – maybe it was last minute, maybe no-one else had been available – and I expected to feel fairly at home anyway since I knew the theatre and some of the staff there. But I hadn’t been sent a ticket, only a reference number to my phone, and when I got to the entrance to the upper gallery, I couldn’t find any trace of email or text from the theatre. I kept telling the usher – a young, cynical guy with a curling lip – that I’d seen it on my phone immediately before I left the house, that I had paid, that I used to work here. My anger was rising (an anger I recognise well from real life, any time I feel I’m being patronised, disrespected, talked down to or blocked by bureaucracy). A group of school children in their early teens and private school uniforms – green and black kilts on the girls, blazers – were lined up at the other entrance just feet away from me, and I felt them and their teachers waiting to judge me if I showed my anger or tried to demand on being let in.

The literal background for this one was that I had tried to book tickets to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Old Vic in London, with K, to find that they were almost sold out and the few remaining would cost, if not your firstborn, then at least some small person to whom you were vaguely attached. But I wasn’t angered by not being able to get oltickets. Fair enough, I should have got onto it as soon as I heard the show was premiering. Somewhere else in my life – or in a lot of aspects of life – there is a recurrent, simmering anger that things are being made difficult for me somehow.

I’ve been to this dream-theatre before, I think, and looked from the entrance to the grand circle or gallery, down towards the stage. But the floor has been absent, there was only water or a sheer drop beneath me. I think I’ve been due either to perform there or to work as an usher, and haven’t been able to get from one part of the theatre to another.

In this dream, after being turned away by the first usher I spoke to, I saw one of the duty managers I used to know, who said she might be able to sneak me in if I waited til the show had just started. But I found myself walking through dark corridors not being able to find my way back to the auditorium. As I recall that, I’m reminded of a dream I had just under a year ago, when I was performing in a far larger show than I’ve done in real life…but more about that in another blog.